Manic Street Preachers - Done & Dusted

I bought this one sight unseen and unheard when it popped up on the auction site I like to frequent. I submitted the minimum bid and forgot about it until I got an email telling me I'd won. This was a few months ago now and it's been sitting in a pile waiting for me to give it a spin. One of the reasons I waited for a while was I honestly wasn't all that interested in hearing a couple of remix tracks.

Then why buy it?

Like I said, I bought it mainly because I assumed it was a Manic Street Preachers album, and it wasn't until later that I discovered it was a Record Store Day deal that only contained a couple of remix tracks. Apparently there are only 2,000 pressings and the packaging wasn't much more than an afterthought ... a plain white jacket with a sticker saying M.S.P. done & dusted. It was in a really thick PVC outer sleeve that also had a couple of hype stickers. Still, it was a band I liked and I was curious.

Their 1996 masterpiece Everything Must Go is essential pop and to me remains my favourite album by Manic Street Preachers. It was also my first album by the band, which likely influenced my opinion. I'd keep getting their albums, but it was chasing the dragon. Sure I'd get a bit of a buzz, but it wasn't the same ... it didn't stop me from trying. So here I am a quarter century later hoping to capture some of the magic and I'm left feeling a bit empty and cheated.

Now, this really is meant for hardcore fans, those who were there from the beginning when the band was a foursome comprised of James on guitar and vocals, Nicky on bass, Sean on drums and the late Richey Edwards who was credited as being a rhythm guitar player but didn't actually play on the records. He was the primary lyricist along with Nicky Wire, although he did play rhythm guitar on "'La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh)" on the album recording.

Which sort of brings us to Done & Dusted, which pulls two singles from their second album 1993's Gold Against the Soul.

Side one features two remixes by The Chemical Brothers of "'La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh)" and as you'd expect they're frenetic and noisy and if you like that sort of thing, you'll love this. For me, it was interesting but nothing that clicked with me. I wish they would have included the album cut as well.

Side two had a vocal and instrumental remix of "Roses in the Hospital" done by Ashley Beedle who is older than me but is apparently a DJ of some repute. I have to admit, I really did like them. Again I wish they would have included the original single but it is what it is.

While this may not have been my cup of tea, it is definitely one of the more interesting curios in my collection, and honestly the vocal version of "Roses in the Hospital" is pretty cool.

Done & Dusted is an odd curiosity that is more odd than curious and as much as I like Manic Street Preachers I'm done and this will probably just gather dust.

Still, I'd rather have it than not.

Besides, I was curious.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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